Given their lifestyles, their backgrounds, many of their views, most people would probably put those two athletes in the same sentence only in the way they would put Barney Frank and George W. Bush in the same political sentence. ... Very carefully.

Yet when it comes to standing up to bullies, bullies of all kinds, the tent is bigger than big. The tent is open to all the better angels of our nature. And as hundreds of Quinnipiac students and staff gathered at Burt Kahn Court to hear Sam speak about his experiences as the first openly gay man to be drafted by the NFL, it struck me that few athletes speak to the big tent better than Schilling and Sam.

If you are open, really open, to nuances of human decency, you know matters are rarely 100-0. Seeing the world in black and white terms, buoyed by the notion that you are not only right but righteous is humanity's most dangerous position.

Over the years, Schilling has shown he can be a know-it-all. He has worn his conservative views on his sleeve. He also is not built to accept that he has ever lost an argument. Yet this also is a man unafraid of the public arena, a man who stared down cancer, and maybe that's the kind of man it takes to do what he did for his daughter. To do what he did for dads everywhere. Schilling went after the cyber bullies. And make no mistake, they are some of the scariest bullies on the face of the Earth in 2015.

But on a Sunday night in February 2014, Sam shifted from an athlete known only to ardent sports fans to cultural symbol when he came out as gay. The former Missouri star, the Southeastern Conference...

HAMDEN — Thirteen months ago, Michael Sam was a college football star about to embark on an NFL career.

But on a Sunday night in February 2014, Sam shifted from an athlete known only to ardent sports fans to cultural symbol when he came out as gay. The former Missouri star, the Southeastern Conference...

(Paul Doyle)

On Feb. 25, Schilling tweeted out congratulations to his daughter, Gabby, for being accepted at Salve Regina in Newport, R.I., to play softball. It is the typical thing that proud dads would do.

The human race can make for an ugly, ugly place. Curt Schilling is a celebrity. He can be contentious. Failed business aside, he also is a bright man and one of the clutch performers in modern baseball history. He is accustomed and built for a level of public abuse. What Gabby Schilling got, however, was beyond disgusting. It was inhumane. We're talking tweets about vile sexual abuse of a high school girl. Any dad would be sickened by this. Some would be moved to break the law and hunt down the punks themselves.

Michael Sam, the first openly gay football player drafted by a team in the NFL spoke to a large crowd of nearly 800-students about his experiences.

Schilling did better. He tracked down who they were, publicly identified them and called two of them out in a powerful 1,700-word post on his blog 38 Pitches. He named Adam Nagel, a part-time college DJ, who has since been suspended from Brookdale Community College. He called out a former vice president of the Theta Xi fraternity who recently graduated from Montclair State University. It turned out that Sean MacDonald was hired over the winter as part-time ticket seller for, yes, the Yankees. He was summarily fired from that job.

There also were some others, according to Schilling, who were college athletes that were suspended and some have reached out to him to apologize … after they got caught.

Look, we can rant all we want about the need for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., to stop these horrible abuses. We're never going to stop cyber-bullying completely. There is no legislation powerful enough to eliminate evil. There are no laws strong enough to end ignorance.

That's what makes what Schilling did so brilliant. He called out these vile punks. And if they don't care about being humiliated, they will care about losing jobs or getting kicked out of school. Others have stood up before, but none so effectively and immediately. Cyber bullies, at least the ones who use sports social media, will think twice now.

Michael Sam knows about bullying. In interviews with Oprah Winfrey and GQ, he talked about how his older brothers used to abuse him daily.

"We called the cops on my brothers so many times I can't even count," Sam told GQ. "Not only for hurting me. They'd abuse my sisters. Verbally abuse my mom. Call me faggot, although they meant scared, sissy, not gay. …. My brothers were evil people. I don't have a relationship with them now. They've both written me letters from prison."

On Tuesday night, he said he still hasn't read those letters.

"I will love them from afar," Sam said.

He told Oprah how he won trophies in various sports, how his mom was so proud of him and how one older brother destroyed those trophies out of envy.

At Quinnipiac, Sam talked about how his oldest brother was shot to death in 1995 and how his oldest sister drowned before he was born. In 1998, his second oldest brother went missing and was pronounced dead a couple of years later.

"It just went all downhill from there," he said. "It was a very depressing time for me and my family. I went through adversity at a young age.

"My mom was working two jobs and trying to support a broken family. She did her best. I was alone and at the mercy of my brothers. I don't hate my brothers. Hate is such a powerful word. But they made me who I am today, because I did not want to become them. At such a young age, I had to make a life-changing decision whether you want to follow their footsteps or want to become better."

Sam, who won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2014 ESPYs, was cut by the Rams at the end of training camp and was on the Cowboys practice squad before being waived. He will attend the NFL's first veteran combine on March 22. He says he has no intentions of giving up on football. In the meantime, he'll be on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars." His partner Peta Murgatroyd was in the audience. He did a move called "The New Yorker,"

This was Sam's first speech at a college campus and ABC was filming it. Students were allowed to ask questions. The media wasn't. There was some celebrity showmanship in this night, but there were also poignant moments.

Sam talked about a teammate's cousin struggling with being gay, twice trying to commit suicide. Moved by Sam's decision to come out, they talked. "She is doing great," he said. "If you can save a life, that's unbelievable.

"I get hateful messages every day, daily. I'm probably getting some right now. You respond to hate with love. Some lady emailed me with a very thoughtful, hateful email. It was so well thought out. I was like, wow, she really hates me. She hated me and the idea [of being gay]. I replied to her, 'I'm sorry you hate me so much, but I still love you.' She never replied back."

Sam responds to hate with love. That's how he answers the bullies. And in his own way, as a dad protecting his daughter, Schilling has done the same. It is interesting that when long-time major league umpire Dale Scott came out as gay in December, he said he was shocked that Schilling tweeted out in support of him. He called Scott one of the nicest guys he'd ever met and said he was a hell of an umpire. When he pitched, of course, Schilling was not a pleasant man. In the year leading up to Sam's disclosure, Schilling also had stressed that he knew he had gay teammates and that it didn't matter to him one bit.

"I'm not the only in the NFL that is gay," Sam said. "I'm just the only one who is out. I understand they want to protect their livelihood. There also will be a day when it doesn't matter.

"Vito [Cammisano, his fiance] told me that no one could do this but me, because I'm so strong and determined. I'll take the responsibility."